christian faur: crayon series 1 + true color.

I have an overwhelming sentimental attachment to crayons. (For some proof, check out the design of my Twitter page.) Not just the sense-memory of using crayons when I was a kid, but as an adult realizing the fundamental artistic ideas that those little sticks of wax represented to me; colour, creation, exploration, and (a particular sub-set of the general societal crayon fascination) the connection between word and colour. This, for a five year-old, is where written description and visual incarnation collided: the language of colour.

I remember the exact moment I figured out what “Burnt Sienna” meant, and immediately, there was this incredible shade, so much more than an “orange”, right there in my grubby little hand. Don’t even get me started on the others: Goldenrod, Raw Umber, Orchid, Periwinkle. The connection between what I read and what I saw was beautifully obvious, and obvious in its beauty.

Artist Christian Faur understands not only the adult attraction to the ideals of crayons, but has amped them up to create incredible, hand-crafted, crayon-pixellated, eye-defying images that are unlike anything I’ve seen before. Straddling a crossing between sculpture and photography, wax and print, he assembles more than 100,000 hand-cast crayons of his own shades and hues into staggeringly beautiful works of art. Impressionistic, with a hint of trompe l’oeil, the tiny crayon columns of separate colour simultaneously appease the eye and defy it. This is crayon-Pointillism, taking the agonizingly detailed pin pricks of colour pain-stakingly arranged on the canvas, á la Georges Seurat, and leaving the brain to do the other half of the work. Its beauty is partially already realized by the patterns of colour, but then our eye struggles to put the rest together.

A master of balance, not just between bright shades, but between greys and primaries, he shows that he can not only deftly mix colours to imitate the physical nuance of an actual photograph, but also has the control to create the shapes in greys and white and augment the images artistically with colour, rather than creating the shapes with only colours themselves. It’s jarring and gorgeous, creating an almost physical sensation as our mind tries to adjust these point of colour into one big comprehensive picture. The experience of trying to see it is just as important as finally seeing.

Seen from the side, not only does the work involved become more apparent, but an almost separate beauty emerges; the sculptural aspects of the pieces come into view, like miniature crayon horizons, tilted to reveal their relief, these side-ways typographies of colour give us a little insight, from this angle, of what our brains see so differently when viewed from straight on.

Says Faur on his website: “…I have developed a mapping system that translates the English alphabet into twenty six discrete colors and I use these crayon ‘fonts’ to add words and language to each of the pieces in the show… The direct representation of language in each piece further imbues the works with meaning and brings an aspect of color into each composition reminiscent of DNA coding. The alphabetic key at the lower left of each panel allows the viewer to interpret the individual words written throughout the various panels.”

Comments

What an incredible stumble! I just wrote a post where I was looking for ideas to create art with recycled crayons. I developed a program in the Dominican Republic where we provide supplies for education to children and teachers in the northern mountains. We originally started the program by donating crayons, which proved to be useless down there… and now I have mass amounts of crayons to make use of. Our plan is to use the art and products to sell, and raise money for supplies. So far we have made crayon candles (total fail) and crayon- Tye die jars. Any ideas for other use of crayon in art? (We are not as skilled as you are with our artistic skills =]).

i understand your sentimental attachment to crayons. i remember when i upgraded from a 12- colour pack to 48-colour or something.. suddenly there were burnt umbers, aquamarine blues, yellow/oranges and orange/yellows. it was like a coming of age.
I also used to love going to the hardware store just so i could look at the rows and rows of paint colour charts.
have you seen the carved crayon work of Pete Goldlust? its pretty neat- http://www.petegoldlust.com/carvedcrayons.html#

You’re blog is great, i just discovered it today when i was looking for some research on gregory crewdson. good music too by the way!

[…] I have an overwhelming sentimental attachment to crayons. (For some proof, check out the design of my Twitter page.) Not just the sense-memory of using crayons when I was a kid, but as an adult realizing the fundamental artistic ideas that those little sticks of wax represented to me; colour, creation, exploration, and (a particular sub-set of the general societal crayon fascination) the connection between word and colour. This, for a five year-o … Read More […]